Alice felt numb. They’d been best friends for so long. A flood of thoughts filled her head. She fought them off by thinking about the past.
She had been with Milly when her husband had died. At the time, Alice had been surprised at how strong Milly had been through it all and how soon she’d adapted to her new life. It was as if her husband had never been around at all. It was only when Stanley had left for the last time that Alice had finally understood how Milly felt. Life was so much easier without a husband to fret about.
She poured a glass of port, sat back in the chair and took a large gulp. It made her feel light-headed. She closed her eyes . . . and quickly opened them again when an image of her husband filled her head. He was smiling his boyish smile, with the chipped tooth gleaming white in the corner of his mouth.
My husband lies buried in my garden, and now my best friend’s broken body is lying cold at the bottom of the sea. What a horrible turn of events.
She finished her glass of port and poured herself another one. The bottle was nearly empty.
“What now, Alice Green?” she said out loud.
She raised the glass in the air. She was feeling very tipsy now.
“To absent friends,” she said, “Milly Lancaster and you, Stanley Green, you bastard.”
She drained the glass and placed it carefully on the coffee table. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DC Harriet Taylor parked outside her house. There was nothing more they could do until the forensic investigators had finished going over Milly Lancaster’s car.
She found some ginger beer lurking in the back of her fridge and took a glass outside to the back garden. The wind was blowing in from the west which meant a new weather front was on the way. The house was still new to her — she’d bought it without even viewing it in person. The photographs on the estate agent’s website had sold it to her immediately. It was a three-bedroom detached house with different views of the Atlantic depending on which room you were in. Her neighbours were mostly middle class — and the peace and quiet suited Taylor just fine. She’d been lucky. When she had made the offer on the house, her head had not been quite right. It was three weeks after the accident which had turned her world upside down.
Taylor sat down on the garden bench and breathed in the crisp sea air. She thought about the day of the accident. She remembered it as clearly as if it had been yesterday. Probably she always would. It had been the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Night. It had been cold and damp, as it always was in Edinburgh in November, and Taylor had been called out to investigate a burglary. Fireworks were going off all around the city and the air was thick with smoke and the stench of sulphur. Other than that, it had a been a pretty ordinary evening.
When she got back to the station, nobody would look her in the eye. Had she done something wrong? If so, she had no idea what. Eventually, Inspector Morag Childes, a hulking mass of a woman, appeared and asked Taylor into her office.
The look in Childes’ eyes was something Taylor would never forget. She remembered the conversation in that office word for word.
“Take a seat,” Childes had said.
“What’s going on?” Taylor sat down. “Everybody around here is treating me like I have the plague.”
Childes looked out of the window. A huge bang went off and the sky lit up with red, blue and green light.
“There’s been an accident down on the Lothian Road,” Childes said to the window.
“An accident?”
“A lorry hit a car head on. The people in the car didn’t stand a chance.”
“That’s terrible. But what’s it got to do with me?”
“I’m afraid Daniel was driving the car.”
She went numb at the sound of her husband’s name. Daniel ‘Danny’ Taylor was a property developer in the city. They had been married for two years.
“Daniel was killed instantly,” Childes continued. "The woman in the passenger seat died on the way to hospital.”
It didn’t take Taylor long to realise what had been going on. The woman in the car with Danny was a client — and she was not the first woman to go for a late-night drive in Danny’s car. As Taylor dug a bit further and discovered the sordid details of Danny’s cheating, the initial grief turned to anger and then pure hatred. Her husband had been playing around from before the time they were married. Everything suddenly fell into place — the late-night property viewings, all the evenings supposedly spent working. Danny had been making a fool out of her since the day they met.
When Taylor had finally returned to work after the funeral, things started to get worse. Underneath the sympathetic faces and hidden in the undertones of the kind words, something else was happening. Her colleagues were laughing at her. People she had risked her life with were now mocking her. Harriet Taylor, the policewoman who hadn’t even realised her husband was having an affair.
In the end she had woken up one morning and decided enough was enough. She needed to get as far away from Edinburgh as possible. She started frantically searching through the jobs on the internal website and the DC post in Trotterdown was perfect. It was far enough away from the ghosts in Edinburgh, and a promotion to boot. Taylor begged Inspector Childes to recommend her for the post and Childes agreed. The insurance money from the accident more than covered the cost of the expensive house and Taylor had started her new life in Trotterdown in January that year.
And still, after six months, it still did not seem real. Growing up on one of the less desirable estates in Edinburgh, she would never have dreamed she would one day own a house like this. But then she wouldn’t have expected quite a lot of the other things that had happened either.
This is all that’s left of Danny Taylor, she thought, a house with a sea view and a heart full of hatred.
Her mobile phone rang, with a number on the screen she did not recognise. “We’ve got word from forensics,” said her colleague DI Jack Killian. “I tried to get hold of Duncan but he’s not answering his phone.”
“He’s at the Unicorn with his wife. What did they find?”
“They’ve gone over the whole car,” Killian told her. “They’ve got some new diagnostic equipment they use these days and they found something interesting.”
“Sir?”
“The handbrake was off when the car went over the edge and they reckon the engine was off too.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not finished. All four doors were locked. Not just locked but jammed closed. Forensics could tell. They’re not a hundred percent sure but the head technician reckons the woman was locked inside the car and then it was pushed over the cliff.”
“Murdered?”
“Alan Littlemore doesn’t usually make mistakes.”
“What about the body?”
“There was definitely somebody in the car when it went over the edge. Littlemore reckons it went over nose first and hit the rocks at the bottom, and the woman was thrown out the windscreen on impact. They found traces of blood and hair on the broken glass. I’ve checked the tide tables — the car was jammed in the rocks but the tide could easily have washed the body of a woman out to sea. Milly Lancaster was not a large woman, by all accounts.”